News Rorschach Blotter

Here's one of those news stories that, merely by virtue of the fact that it is getting coverage will cause some people to get up in arms:

An argument with a cab driver about religious views ended with a trip to hospital for two Tri-state men. Andrew Nelson and Jeremy Inbus, both of Cincinnati, were in Nashville, Tenn., to visit a friend when they left a bar and hailed a taxicab. The two men told police they discussed religion with their driver, Ibrahim Ahmed, 37, until the conversation grew heated.

Nelson and Inbus told police they paid the driver and got out of the taxi, and police said Ahmed chased them down in a parking lot and tried to run them over.

Let's put on our wobbly, endlessly-uncertain relativist hats: Maybe, every day across America, there's a Presbyterian taxi driver trying to run down a Lutheran over the finer points of protestant theology - and it's just not reported! Maybe Andrew and Jeremy are both devout Muslims, and Ibrahim is a hardcore atheist who thinks that theocrats of all varieties are destroying the world.

This is the natural ass-end of multicultural sensitivity: Any assumptions, any judgements based on outward identifiers is nary a whisker away from wearing the linens. Don't you dare conclude anything about this story - you weren't there, after all, were you? Maybe the cab driver was really angry. Maybe they only claimed to have paid. Which would make the attempted vehicular homicide more understandable. You might run them over too. Who are we to judge?

Related: Dave Byrne flails away. I'm a lifelong admirer of his music, but when I read things like this I see him jerking around, doing the "you may find yourself" routine and pushing the glasses up his nose.